Night Secrets

by Thomas H. Cook

  It was a sound that jerked him up a few hours later and made him pull forward in the chair, his eyes searching the room like a hunted child. He listened for it again, the slight screech that had awakened him, and as he listened, he thought of all the things that it might be, a crackhead lurking in the shadows, a prostitute looking for a dingy corner to turn a five-buck trick, an old tosspot, sucking the last pink drops from his bottle of Thunderbird. In the silence, the fog of sleep lifting steadily, he opened the top drawer of his desk and felt for the .45 which nestled among the papers there. It was in his hand when he heard footsteps in the corridor, and as he moved toward the door, he felt his hand caress the pistol grip more firmly, his finger pull down with a hard impulsive longing upon the steel lip of the trigger.

  He threw open the door in a single, quick motion, hesitated an instant, then stepped out into the corridor. He could see two feet as they bounded up the stairs then disappeared over the top of the landing, but he felt no need to pursue them. Instead, he walked out to the stairs and checked on the old woman.

  For a time, he remained with her, leaning against the jagged brick wall, just to make sure that no one returned to do her harm. As he kept watch, he thought of his mother, the one who’d left them all so many years before.

  The old woman shifted fitfully, then drifted back to stillness, and not long after that, Frank returned to his office and tried to do the same. But it was no use, and so after a time he sat up at his desk and began going over what he would need to do tomorrow.

  He thought of the address Phillips had given him. He would begin there, with the wife. He would follow her trail wherever it led, while all the time hoping it led to that “something extra,” the sort of case that called to him, that involved a truly deep detection.

  The sun had not yet risen when Frank made his way over the old woman and up the stairs. The air was faintly pink with the approaching light by then, but the retreating darkness clung to it insistently, as if fighting for a position it could no longer hold.

  He headed west, toward the river, moving slowly down the nearly deserted street until he could see the massive pillars of the West Side Highway. Just beyond them, the Hudson swept out in a long black strip, a single tugboat chugging northward, its rugged hull framed against the twinkling shoreline of New Jersey. For an instant, Frank felt the impulse to raise his hand and wave to the pilot, then realized that from the distant vantage point of the wheelhouse, he could only appear as a ragged shadow, his waving hand a vague, barely perceivable movement against the city’s wall of sprinkled light.

  He dropped his hands into his jacket pockets, then turned back east. He thought of going to Toby’s after-hours place, perhaps sitting down across the table from Farouk. But the thought didn’t really appeal to him, and so he decided to walk the streets instead, until he was ready to begin work.

  At the corner of Tenth Avenue, he glanced to the south. Several police cars were parked on either side of the avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets. The orange stripes of an EMS ambulance were clearly visible in the revolving flash of their lights, and just to the right of it, Frank could see the blinking pale-blue neon of the fortuneteller’s window.

  He turned and headed down the avenue, moving more quickly as he crossed Forty-eighth Street, and faster still by the time he came to Forty-seventh. From there, he could see several men gathered in small clusters on the sidewalk. Several of them were uniformed patrolmen. Some were stringing yellow strips of CRIME SCENE tape. Only one detective was on the street, but even from nearly a block away, Frank could tell mat it was Leo Tannenbaum from Manhattan North.

  Tannenbaum turned toward him as one of the uniformed patrolmen stopped him with a quick “Who are you, pal?”

  “Let him through,” Tannenbaum said. “It’s a local PI.”

  The uniform stepped aside grudgingly and let Frank pass.

  “Out for a little stroll, Frank?” Tannenbaum asked as he offered his hand.

  Frank shook it absently, but didn’t reply.

  “Strange time of day for it,” Tannenbaum added.

  “I don’t sleep much,” Frank said. He glanced toward the window just as a flash from the Crime Scene Unit camera exploded behind the blue curtain.

  Tannenbaum smiled. “Haven’t seen much of you since Farouk iced that Riviera bastard.”

  “I’ve been around.”

  “Crawling the night,” Tannenbaum said matter-of-factly. “You must give a few people the creeps.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “Covallo got twenty-five years,” Tannenbaum told him. “I guess you heard that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My guess is, she’ll do about a dime, then she’ll be released. Powerful friends, Frank. It’s the way of the world.”

  “Maybe,” Frank said indifferently. He nodded toward the line of police cars, the EMS ambulance. “What happened?”

  “Nothing you’d be interested in,” Tannenbaum said. “We got the smoking gun.” He smiled. “Only it was a razor.”

  Frank glanced back at him. “Man, woman, what?”

  “Woman,” Tannenbaum said. “Early fifties, I’d say.”

  Frank thought a moment. “Gray hair?” he asked finally. “Toenails painted purple?”

  Tannenbaum’s face tensed. “Right on the button. How’d you know?”

  “I saw her this afternoon. Farouk had his fortune told.”

  Tannenbaum laughed unbelievingly. “I didn’t know Farouk was into that kind of stuff.”

  “It was just for the experience, he said.”

  Tannenbaum took out his notebook. “When was this?”

  “Around four in the afternoon.”

  “See anybody else?”

  “Another woman.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  Frank thought a moment. “She was very … Very …”

  “Beautiful?”

  It wasn’t the word he’d been looking for, but he let it go. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

  Tannenbaum nodded. “Well, it won’t do anybody any good now,” he said. “She’s the smoking gun. We got her cold. Everything but the blade in her hand. We’re going to book her, then take her downtown for arraignment. My guess is, she’ll break somewhere on the way.”

  Frank’s eyes shifted to the right slightly, peering just over Tannenbaum’s shoulder, so that he saw her clearly when suddenly she came out of the door, very erect, with a single lumbering detective at her arm, his faded-green suit pressed against the radiant embroidery of her dress. At first she moved forward very deliberately, her face held high, her eyes staring straight ahead. Then she stopped, and Frank watched with amazement as her eyes shot over to him, then clung briefly like two dark hooks before they abruptly let go.

  “That the woman you saw, Frank?” Tannenbaum asked immediately.

  She moved forward again, and Frank’s eyes followed her as she made her way to the car, the detective still walking closely at her side. At the door she paused a moment, as if gathering herself together, then bowed her head slowly and got in.

  “That the same woman, Frank?” Tannenbaum repeated. “The one you saw?”

  Frank continued to peer over Tannenbaum’s shoulder, staring intently as the detective pulled himself in beside her, groaning softly as he did so. He could still see her face in vivid profile behind the glass, and for a moment he concentrated on her once again, taking in the proud line of her nose, the fullness of her lips, the way her hair fell in wild ringlets across her brow.

  “Yes,” he whispered, “that’s her.”

  Tannenbaum leaned toward him quickly. “What?”

  Frank turned his attention back to Tannenbaum. “The woman I saw.”

  “You’re sure?” Tannenbaum asked insistently. “This afternoon, you said?”

  Frank nodded.

  “Well, you know the next question as well as I do, Frank. Did anything look suspicious?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all, even ju
st a mood?”

  “I didn’t notice anything.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Sitting in a chair.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “And the old woman was there, too, right?”

  “She was there.”

  “Telling Farouk’s fortune,” Tannenbaum added with a short dry laugh.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see anybody else?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear her say anything to the old lady?”

  “No.”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  “She was in another room.”

  “How about Farouk? She say anything to him?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “So, as far as you know, she …” Tannenbaum began.

  “What’s her name?” Frank asked, interrupting him.

  Tannenbaum smiled. “Well, that’s the funny thing, Frank. We don’t know yet.”

  Frank glanced toward her again. “No name?”

  “Oh, she’s got a name all right. She just won’t give it to us, that’s all.”

  “She won’t talk?”

  “She wouldn’t even acknowledge that we’d read her the Miranda warnings,” Tannenbaum said. “My guess is, she’s doing what she figures is a great imitation of a fruitcake. You know, working up an insanity defense.”

  Frank nodded.

  “But it’s not going to do her any goddamn good,” Tannenbaum said confidently. “Because we got blood all over her blouse, and good solid fingerprints on the razor, and a guy who saw her with it in her hand.” He shook his head. “No doubt about it, she killed the old lady.”

  “Who was she, the fortune-teller?” Frank asked.

  “As far as we can figure out, her name was Maria Salome,” Tannenbaum answered. “And there was another old woman who lived here, too.” He pulled out his notebook and flipped to the appropriate page. “Her name was Maria, too. Maria Jacobe. We’re talking to her now. She claims she was somewhere else when it happened.” He closed the notebook. “The three of them all lived here, running this fortune-telling scam.” He looked at Frank strangely. “Three women,” he said. “One’s dead, one says she didn’t see a thing, and one won’t talk to us at all, not a goddamn word.”

  Frank looked back toward the car as it pulled from the curb, then moved slowly away from him, the taillights burning through the dense gray air like two infuriated eyes.

  The old woman was pulling herself to her feet as Frank came down the stairs. She stepped quickly out of his way, grunting softly as he continued past her and headed down the dark narrow corridor that led to his office.

  He stopped at the door, pulled out his keys, glancing idly at the rusty metal letter box that hung precariously from the brick wall. Someone had dropped something into it. The slight screech of the small rusty hinges sounded softly as he opened it, reminding him of what had woken him earlier in the night.

  He took out the envelope, brought it to his desk and turned on the light. The paper inside was blank, but as he opened it, a small red bead dropped softly onto his desk. He recognized it immediately, saw the woman again through the curtain mat had separated them.

  He placed the paper on his desk, picked up the bead and held it gently beneath the light of his desk lamp. It was very delicate, and the hard white light from the lamp seemed almost to melt it into a single moist drop of blood, one which his flesh immediately absorbed.

  Tannenbaum had said that she’d be booked, then arraigned, and as the nearly empty subway rattled toward Foley Square, Frank glanced at his watch and calculated that he might already have missed the arraignment, that she might be locked up in one of the tiny cells of the Women’s House of Detention by now, standing in the corner, as he saw her in his mind, her face staring silently from behind the bars. Mrs. Phillips wouldn’t be up and about yet anyway. He had time.

  The halls of the criminal court building in lower Manhattan were already crowded despite the early-morning hour, and Frank found it necessary to elbow his way through scores of milling people as he moved from courtroom to courtroom until he reached Municipal Courtroom 7, where, according to the docket posted outside the door, an unnamed defendant was soon to be arraigned.

  Inside the courtroom, a smudgy haze of cigarette smoke engulfed the long wooden benches where people sat silently or muttered quietly to one another. Some were lawyers waiting for their turns at the bench. Others were the relatives of those who’d been arrested during the night. They were the ones he’d always felt sorry for each time he’d seen them trudge wearily into the station house when he’d been a cop in Atlanta. No matter what the hour or the weather outside, they’d seemed always to be shivering with cold or wet with rain. He knew what had happened only a short time before. The phone had jangled, pulling them from the only peace they knew. Then a voice had broken over them, screeching or wailing, telling them that they were in trouble again, that they needed money. Frank knew that in the end they nearly always brought it, that it was often all they had left after the weekly bills, and mat even as they forked it over to the little shiny-headed bondsman, they knew that the voice was lying, had always lied, but that they would still have to spend their lives taking it for the truth.

  “Yo, man, got a light?”

  Frank turned and saw a wiry little man in a sleek blue suit as he leaned forward to talk to the large black man on the bench just in front of him.

  “Yeah, I got one,” the man said. He pulled out the book of matches and handed it to the other man. “You can keep it”

  “Thanks,” the man said. He lit the bowl of a brown Kaywoodie pipe, then waved out the match, his eyes still on the other man, studying him carefully. “So how you doing?” he asked lightly.

  “Okay, I guess,” the man replied wearily. He was wearing gray flannel work clothes and smelled faintly of motor oil.

  “My name’s Upjohn, brother, glad to meet you.”

  The man shrugged halfheartedly.

  Upjohn smiled. “You need a lawyer, by any chance?”

  The other man kept his eyes fixed on a young boy who stood near the bench while two attorneys huddled before the judge. “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  “’Cause I know a good one, if you do.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, let me ask you this, brother, what we talking about here?”

  The man glanced back at him. “You mean, who’s in trouble?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My son done something to a girl. Cops say she’s underage.”

  The other man’s eyes flitted toward the bench. “He don’t look that old, himself. What’d he do, knock her up?” He grinned. “My guess is, he didn’t have much choice. You know how it is. Things happen, then somebody gets knocked up. You think that’s what it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “’Cause if that’s the situation,” Upjohn told him, “I got another guy could handle that for you.” He smiled. “It’s all a matter of money.”

  The man looked oddly encouraged. “It is?”

  “Always,” Upjohn told him. He plucked the pipe from his mouth and pointed the black, well-chewed stem at the other man. “You don’t mind my saying so, brother, I think you could use a little advice.”

  The man nodded. He had an open, trusting face, an easy mark.

  Upjohn smiled sweetly. “Well, lemme come up and talk to you.” He stood up immediately, brushed quickly past Frank’s knees and joined the other man, huddling with him closely, his words now lost in a flurry of conspiratorial whispers.

  Frank turned away from them and watched the bench. The lawyers were still standing shoulder-to-shoulder, talking earnestly with the judge, a slender red-haired woman who covered the microphone carefully with her thin white hand.

  To the left of the bench, a large glass enclosure separated the men behind it
from the rest of the people in the room. It was lighted a shade more brightly, and the mood behind the glass was a bit more defiant. In such places, the edge turned sharp, and the air seemed to grow hard and desolate around those particular people who had obviously offended the peace and good order of the City of New York more deeply than the minor-league felons who filled the benches behind the rail.

  In Atlanta, Frank had spent long hours looking at the same sort of men who now slumped behind the glass. He had watched their lost, hunted eyes comb the walls around them, and of all the people he’d ever known, they’d seemed the least connected by the common ties of life. Even now, as he moved ceaselessly along the midnight streets, he would sometimes see a man smoking sullenly in a doorway or moving with a quick, nervous gait down a deserted back street, and he would know with certainty that within only a few hours—at most, a few days—die man would end up behind the glass, and that nothing could be done about it, absolutely nothing, either for him or for those he was doomed to harm. For everyone involved, it was already too late.

  He thought of the bead again, then the woman who’d sent it to him, and he felt his body tense slightly as he began to search the room, trying to find her. He saw small knots of bleary-eyed lawyers, court stenographers and bailiffs, but the woman obviously had not been brought in for arraignment yet. He leaned back, lit a cigarette and waited, his eyes following the stream of people that shifted about the room in a way that seemed as random and directionless as the lives that had brought them there.

  He was on his third cigarette when he saw her come through the large wooden door at the front of the room. Instantly, he felt a tremor move through him, a gentle quaking that he acted quickly to control. He sat up immediately and blinked the long night’s tiredness from his faintly burning eyes.

  She was escorted by a policewoman in full uniform, and as she moved to her place before the bench, the men behind the glass snapped to attention, laughed and muttered to each other, their eyes fastened hungrily on the sway of her body as it moved into position before the bench.

  She stood very still and utterly silent while the judge took a moment to review her file. From where he sat in the smoky gallery, Frank could see only the blue prison dress they’d given her and the long black hair that fell across her shoulders. He already knew what had happened to her during the time that had passed since her arrest. They’d taken her to Manhattan North, stripped her of the black, blood-soaked dress, searched her body with a cool, methodical indignity, then tossed her the plain blue dress: Put this on, sister, before you catch a cold. The black dress was now the property of the district attorney’s office, and unless she copped a plea, it would be pawed over a thousand times before the prosecuting attorney finally waved it dramatically before the jury’s eyes, his voice rising in phony outrage: Look at this, a woman’s blood.